Ron Perlman

*You can thank a paralyzing fear of quicksand and Edward G. Robinson for the biggest, baddest dude on Sons of Anarchy*

Sixty-two-year-old Ron Perlman has done most of his best acting under heavy layers of makeup. In the role that made him famous in 1987, playing Vincent in the TV series Beauty and the Beast, he brought a ferocious sensitivity to a romantic brute; in Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy, he played film’s most charming demon. In Hellboy and City of Lost Children, Perlman uses his charm and empathy as a counterpoint to his fearsome appearance; in others, including Alien: Resurrection and 2010’s Drive, he uses it to terrify and intimidate. But as Clay Morrow—the biker-gang godfather who will break any law and crack any skull to protect his famly on FX’s Sons of Anarchy—he gets to play with his whole arsenal: sometimes warm and charming, other times ferocious and vicious, but always deeply principled. It’s the defining performance of his career. So how did he get there?

GQ: What scared you most when you were a kid?

Ron Perlman: Quicksand. The first time I saw it was maybe in a Tarzan movie. I asked my dad to explain what this was that could take a man and not allow him any possibility of saving himself. It was terrifying to me. There was a long period of time where I would only go to movies that were shot in cities. Anything that was shot rurally. that could possibly include a scene with quicksand? I would stay home.

GQ: You grew up in the Bronx in New York. That’s such a city kid thing to fear.

Ron Perlman: Yeah, I wouldn’t go see Westerns, I wouldn’t go see jungle movies. And then I went on a school trip on the opening day of Lawrence of Arabia. I said, &#x201C;Well, this should be pretty safe." And there’s that horrific scene where the kid and the camel go down in the quicksand—that probably cost me forty or fifty thousand dollars in psychotherapy.

GQ: What villain scared you most when you were a kid?

Ron Perlman: They all did! I was very scared of Edward G. Robinson. Even when he was playing the good guy, he was so single-minded and non-negotiable. Like, &#x201C;My way or the highway." He probably did that more effectively than anybody else. If your number was up with Eddie, you were dead. And you believed. He just exploded off the screen. But my favorite villain of all time was anybody played by Basil Rathbone. I’ve never seen anybody who tops him. In The Adventures of Robin Hood and Captain Blood he was the perfect foil for Errol Flynn. He had equal amounts of panache but in a dark way, as opposed to the bright aura of Errol the swashbuckler. He was just real easy to hate and he haunted your dreams.

GQ: Has a villain ever appeared in your dreams?

Ron Perlman: Oh, nightly. Some of them are quite vivid.

GQ: Can you give me an example?

Ron Perlman: Landlords—there’s a lot of that. IRS agents. People who are chasing me down for something I believe I don’t have to give. People who are wanting something of me that I find impossible. With all of them, there are intimations of impending doom.

GQ: What other villainous performances have you admired?

Ron Perlman: The two scariest performances by any living actor were delivered by Robert DeNiro—in Cape Fear and The Untouchables, when he plays Al Capone. I don’t think I’ve ever been more affected by the threat and the power of that gangster mentality, and there were some great Al Capones over the course of time. But his was really, really haunting. Oh, and Joe Pesci in GoodFellas. De Niro’s pretty scary in that too, but he’s topped by Pesci.

GQ: Do you ever tap into your own fears when you’re playing a villain?

Ron Perlman: Let me put it this way: I definitely need to understand the villains I play. The best cause pain to anesthetize themselves against their own pain. Understanding that makes the villain even scarier because now they are real and not just purely evil. Once you understand the insatiability of those motivations, that person takes on a dimension that’s way more interesting to watch. Also if it’s done effectively, it can be quite affecting.

GQ: Do you think villains are born bad, or do you think they become bad?

Ron Perlman: I like to believe that everyone is born with the same skill set, and that it is the influences that one comes upon. What he hungers for is definitely going to be affected by what he got or didn’t get in those years when he was forming his psyche and his values. So I think villains are made. The more I can see what it was that made them the way they are, the more interesting it is for me to play one and perhaps for the audience to witness one.

GQ: Playing Vincent on TV’s Beauty and the Beast really shaped your whole career. Had you known by then that you could really bring the menace?

Ron Perlman: Vincent, the Beast, was the quintessential coming together of an awkward feeling about oneself as a child. I always felt physically awkward. My self-confidence didn’t come from my appearance, it came from other things that I did. But certainly not my appearance. When it came to leading with your good looks or lack thereof, there was a big chasm. The literature and the films, and all of the culture that I responded to, spoke to that. I think probably the seminal moment for me, where I watched a human being who didn’t look at all like the character he was playing give a performance of monstrous proportions but with so much humanity, was when I saw Charles Laughton in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I think a light bulb went off for me. He was the most beautiful; he was the most human; he was the most attractive character in that film, and yet he was physically repulsive. The notion that such poetry can exist in humanity really moved me. Getting to play the Beast—I mean, literally someone who is completely unacceptable in a societal setting, and has to live in a nether region, but who longs for human contact because his human impulses and kindnesses are stronger than most humans—was huge. What brings out the beast in him is any injustice, anything that has to do with a lack of balance and fairness. His reaction to those circumstances are violent—and appropriately violent, I should say. That was the first time I got a chance to play that guy. That was the coming together of all this stuff that rumbled inside of me and what I responded to in the hunchback. It was my chance to put my own imprimatur on this human dilemma.

GQ: Are there villains you rooted for?

Ron Perlman: Oh yeah, tons. Heath Ledger in [The Dark Knight] and his forebear, Jack Nicholson, in the first coming of the Joker. Guys who are larger than life and theatrical and deliciously unpredictable—they’re far more interesting than the good guys most of the time. They have these psychological layers that an audience can really cling on to, become fascinated with, much more so than these true-blue, one-dimensional, square-jawed good guys. I’m constantly rooting for the villain because he’s clearly the most interesting invention in the piece—or should be if it’s a very sophisticated, very well-rendered piece of writing. Jack Nicholson and Ledger were just more interesting than anyone else on that screen.

GQ: When you’re offered a villain role, what are you looking for in script?

Ron Perlman: I never want to play a character whose violent actions come out of nowhere. That’s gratuitous to me. All my roles are like my children, I have no favorites—but I love Clay Morrow on Sons of Anarchy because Kurt Sutter has supplied a value system for this guy that is very familial, so it’s really rooted in the love for people that he’s representing, the people he’s protecting. He’s the president of this club. It’s a very big extended family, for which he’s responsible. He’s a born leader because there’s nothing he would not do for his family. When he performs a horrific act, which he’s more than capable of doing—two tours in Vietnam, a highly decorated Marine who’s got this streak in him—he’s never gratuitous. It springs out of something that comes from his belief system. So I don’t consider it violent. It is violent, but I consider it something that is organic and called for, like, &#x201C;The guy had it coming..." When you can justify horrific violence in that way, then you’re talking about a piece that’s worth taking a look at. That’s the nature of great theater and great film.

GQ: Do you think Clay sees himself as a bad guy?

Ron Perlman: No, Clay sees himself as a hero. Clay sees himself as a lonely man who no one will ever truly understand, because people can’t understand what it’s like to be responsible for the greater good and for everyone’s well being. Even to the point where you have to sacrifice one of your own for the greater good. There’s nothing more horrific than that; but even murder can be justified as the right thing to do. Like, The Godfather’s the greatest movie ever made. Man, we do like our gangsters. You look at Don Corleone and you felt for him. You know, &#x201C;Look at what I have to take care of here... I’m responsible for an empire and if you don’t understand that, too frickin’ bad."

GQ: There are so many bad-guy stereotypes. Do you worry about clichés?

Ron Perlman: No. I mean if you have the makings of what I’ve begun to describe, which is characters that have incredibly magnetic, compelling psychological profiles, even if they’re horrific, and you find the truth of that, which is what we’re constantly striving to do, then that’s not a cliché. No matter how many times you’ve seen it. If it’s a living, breathing organism, which is really the job of the actor, then it’s not a cliché. If you catch me phoning it in, then you’re welcome to put me in the pokey and take away my SAG card.

GQ: You’ve worked with so much makeup and prosthetics. What does it feel like when you look in that mirror and see something that’s not you?

Ron Perlman: When you’re playing a character that is transformational, who looks nothing like you, who is an invention that springs out of another artist’s imagination—it is different than playing a villain with my face. In other words, me and [special-effects master] Ric Baker read the same Beauty and the Beast script and he saw one thing and I saw a whole other set of things. So I went and did my homework, and I make my decisions about the humanitarian aspects, the behavioral aspects. But I reserved all my final decisions and waited with my eyes closed until he said, &#x201C;Okay, open wide." And there the Beast was. That kind of transformation affected everything—the way I walked, how much power I felt I had how heavy I felt. When it’s an abstract creation like Hellboy or Salvatore in The Name of the Rose, or the Beast, I don’t make my final decisions until I see [the makeup] because that’s going to affect what I do.

GQ: What do villains have in common with heroes?

Ron Perlman: A code. With a hero, it’s an admirable code; it’s some deep-rooted, true-north compass. And the code of a villain is short-circuited somewhere along the way; he thinks it’s right, but it’s mostly self-serving, and it doesn’t have anything to do with altruism. But they’re both determined to effect certain changes in the world—some for good and some for not-so-good.

GQ: Has it ever been difficult to shake off a part?

Ron Perlman: When I was younger it was more difficult. Now, when they say &#x201C;Cut," I pull out a sandwich.

GQ: Any real-world villains you’d like to play?

Ron Perlman: I’d like to take a crack at Rasputin—that would be an interesting psyche to delve into.

GQ: How evil, percentage-wise, would you say you are in real life?

Ron Perlman: I don’t consider myself evil, I consider myself resolved. If something strikes me as insane and unjust, I cannot tolerate that. If it affects somebody who I love, then bad things could happen. In those cases, I am resolved to act. Resolved is different than evil. Although there are these strange fantasies [adopts a menacing voice] that I will tell you about when we have our next conversation. Sorry. they’re just fantasies. My shrink said they were okay, right before I killed him.

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